Bring your favorites together in your free personal gallery.
Your galleryTwo Studies of a Dancer, Raising Her Skirt in Her Two Hands
Look first
- What catches your attention?
- Where does your eye go next?
- What would you ask about this work?
Show me
Compare the firmly drawn dancer at the left with the faint one at the right, where Watteau drew her face twice.
Watteau had a sharp eye for fine fabrics and fashionable clothes, as his etched series of fashion figures, the Figures de modes, shows. On this early red chalk sheet he drew the same dancer twice, once firmly from behind and once lightly in profile. In the fainter figure he changed his mind about the face, and both attempts can still be seen.
Red chalk on cream laid paper · 17.6 × 13.3 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Rococo
Look again
What do you notice now?
Try a quick sketch
Take a minute to sketch on any paper. No upload needed.
What did you draw first? What did you leave out?
Details and source
- Museum title
- Two Studies of a Dancer, Raising Her Skirt in Her Two Hands
- Artist
- Jean Antoine Watteau French, 1684-1721
- Date
- 1712/13
- Medium
- Red chalk on cream laid paper
- Dimensions
- 17.6 × 13.3 cm (6 15/16 × 5 1/4 in.)
- Credit line
- Regenstein Collection Endowment
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.